Code Noir Canisia Lubrin 9781836432098

Winner of the Carol Shields Prize for Fiction * Finalist for the Atwood Gibson Writers' Trust Fiction Prize * A Globe and Mail Best Book of 2024

Groundbreaking, dazzling debut fiction from an award-winning poet, perfect for fans of Ocean Vuong and Tommy Orange

'Code Noir': an infamous set of real historical decrees passed in 1685 by King Louis XIV of France, defining the conditions of slavery in the French empire.

The original code had fifty-nine articles; Canisia Lubrin's stunning debut brings together fifty-nine linked fictions in a rare and highly original work of art that riffs on its historical antecedent.

Complemented by line-drawings by renowned visual artist Torkwase Dyson, Code Noir has taken the Canadian literary world by storm and won multiple awards. Ranging from contemporary realism to dystopian literature, futuristic fantasy to historical adventure, these stories are all linked by their characters' determination to live beyond the enclosure of official decrees, beyond the ruins of the past.

'A revelation... Lubrin is one of the finest writers and thinkers of our time.' Maaza Mengiste

'Code Noir is storytelling at its deepest and most intimate.' Dionne Brand

Canisia Lubrin's poetry books include Voodoo Hypothesis and The Dyzgraphxst. Lubrin's work has been recognized with the Griffin Poetry Prize, OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature and others. Lubrin has held fellowships at the Banff Centre, Simon Fraser University, Literature Colloquium Berlin, and studied at York University and the University of Guelph, where she now coordinates the Creative Writing MFA in the School of English & Theatre Studies.

In 2021, Lubrin received a Windham-Campbell prize for poetry, and the Globe & Mail named her Poet of the Year. Code Noir: Metamorphoses is her debut fiction. Born in St. Lucia, Lubrin now lives in Whitby, Ontario, and is poetry editor at McClelland & Stewart.

'Code Noir is a revelation... This book sings in searing language, telling stories that bristle and challenge, comfort and question.' Maaza Mengiste, author of The Shadow King, short-listed for the Booker Prize

'The collection displays tremendous stylistic breadth... The overall effect is a dizzying, disorienting view of 'history's wide grave.' The New Yorker

'An interconnected allegory... Lubrin's iconoclastic flights subvert hierarchies and cover continents and aeons of pain.' The Miramichi Reader (starred review)

'Crackles with life and humor... In its formal inventiveness and sheer audaciousness, Code Noir is unlike anything else that I've ever read. Lubrin is a force.' Christina Sharpe, author of In the Wake

'Code Noir is storytelling at its deepest and most intimate.... These stories are magic, and you must enter them as if you, too, are wondrous.' Dionne Brand, author of A Map to the Door of No Return

'A singular achievement.' Souvankham Thammavongsa, author of How to Pronounce Knife

'A book that radiates life - insistent, unbounded life... A virtuosic assembling of genres, voices, and experiences...with lines gripping the heart and stories suffused with beauty and tenderness.' David Chariandy, author of Brother

'Brilliant, challenging, and ecstatic... A dazzling achievement.' The Globe and Mail

'Visceral, disruptive... Astonishing... Canisia Lubrin has turned her attention to fiction in her striking new work, Code Noir... Play[ing] with form, time, and polyvocality... Grounded in the making and unmaking of historical narratives of Black diasporic experience.' Winnipeg Free Press